Alibaba.

Ant Financial Services Group, the Chinese fintech giant, is planning a funding round that could fetch a valuation similar to the world’s biggest and oldest banks: The digital payment company is raising as much as $5 billion in equity that may value it at more than $100 billion, according to Reuters.

Ant’s last fundraising in 2016 valued the owner of Alipay, China’s top online payment platform, at about $60 billion. The new round should start with a valuation of between $80 billion to $100 billion, the people said.

Apple Inc will accept Chinese mobile payment app Alipay in its local stores, boosting its ties with giant e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd amid a push by the iPhone maker to revive growth in the world’s No.2 economy.

The fintech boom has certainly re-shaped the way business is done and fashioned societal shifts in China’s consumer market; it is changing behaviors. Can the fintech boom also create opportunities to help spur sustainable development?

Now that digital wallets like Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s Ten Pay have become near ubiquitous in the country, where the market for mobile payment reached $5.5 trillion as people use them to pay for clothes, groceries, taxi fares and utility bills, the government wants to bring oversight up to speed by regulating them exactly like banks, said Oliver Rui, a professor of finance at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai (CEIBS).

The incident comes as Chinese users grow increasingly concerned about user privacy and how China’s tech giants are handling personal information. In China, laws require companies to store users’ data on servers in the country, and Chinese tech companies reportedly pass on data when the Chinese government makes a request.

The subway system in the Chinese city of Shanghai will bring in voice and facial recognition technologies developed by e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding as it looks to make life easier for the millions of commuters on one of the longest and busiest mass-transit railway networks on the planet.